An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating with little or no user input. It does so by using sensing devices such as radar, lidar, image sensors, and the like. Autonomous vehicles further use information from global positioning systems (GPS) technology, navigation systems, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure technology, and/or drive-by-wire systems to navigate the vehicle and perform traffic prediction.
While recent years have seen significant advancements in behavior prediction systems, such systems might still be improved in a number of respects. For example, an autonomous vehicle will typically encounter, during normal operation, a large number of vehicles and other objects, each of which might exhibit its own, hard-to-predict behavior. That is, even when an autonomous vehicle has an accurate semantic understanding of the roadway and has correctly detected and classified objects in its vicinity, the vehicle may yet be unable to accurately predict the trajectory and/or paths of certain objects in a variety of contexts.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that are capable of predicting the behavior of various entities or agents encountered by an autonomous vehicle. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.